PS4’s Gaikai game streaming service to launch in 2014, Microsoft mum on retaliation

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When Sony bought Gaikai 18 months ago for $380 million, it was clear that the entertainment titan had big plans for the cloud service. Now, Sony is hinting that we’ll start seeing products based on those plans within a year. A developer beta will supposedly begin early in 2014, with a full North American rollout before the end of the calendar year. Sounds good, but what does Sony actually plan to do with its game streaming service?

Eurogamer caught up with Andrew House, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, and got him to go on the record regarding Gaikai’s purpose. “Our goal is to be able to have a new form of game distribution streamed from the server side, initially to PS4 consoles then gradually moving that out to Vita,” House told Eurogamer. “But eventually, the endgame is to have this available on a multitude of network-connected devices, essentially delivering a console-quality gaming experience on devices which are not innately capable of doing that.”

So where’s Microsoft?

In late September, at the Microsoft Company Meeting, Microsoft demoed Halo 4 streaming to both Windows PCs and Windows Phone devices. In early November, however, the company backed off the technology, telling Polygon that while the technology was impressive in certain circumstances, “It’s really cool and really problematic, all at the same time.” Put more simply, Microsoft isn’t sure consumer broadband is up to the challenge of streaming that much information, and it’s leery of committing to a service that it can’t deliver at a consistently high quality.

Asked specifically about Halo 4, Microsoft’s Albert Penello stated that the demo in late September was a “grand experiment” that would be on hold until consumer networking improved to the point where such a service was viable.

Microsoft is clearly playing its cards more conservatively than Sony on this point, which makes some sense — Sony, having spent $380 million to acquire Gaikai at a time when its own finances are less-than stellar, is undoubtedly under pressure to justify the investment. It’s also fair to ask what percentage of customers will have a good experience with a streaming technology — it makes no sense to put a major push behind a premium feature if only 10-20% of the install base can take advantage of it — especially if it’s a feature you hope to monetize rather than making free to existing Xbox Live and PSN subscribers.

At the same time, however, Microsoft feels like it’s missing the boat on this one. I’ve already covered my own reasons for wanting to see a strong streaming option on the Xbox One, and Microsoft seems better positioned to deliver such a cross-platform experience, given that it already owns the Windows 8 kernel used PCs, Windows Phones, and the Xbox itself.

Streaming solves backwards compatibility problems

One of the advantages PCs have over consoles is that PCs remain backwards compatible — mostly. The truth is, for how good Windows is about playing old games, if you step back far enough, you run into an increasing number of titles that either won’t play nice with a modern operating system, or can’t run on modern video card drivers due to rendering errors or audio engine problems.

Sometimes ingenious tweaks and patches are able to fix these problems, particularly if a game is updated and put out for sale on a platform like Steam or GOG. Oftentimes, they aren’t. If the last set of fully compatible drivers for a 2002 game shipped in 2008 and your video card wasn’t built until 2011, getting a functional video solution is going to be an adventure. Streaming could offer a seamless way to solve this problem. Older titles with lower bandwidth needs, meanwhile, would be an ideal test-case.

I still think Microsoft is better positioned to catch this wave, but if Sony is moving to launch Gaikai in 2014 and MS has no equivalent on the burner, the PS4 could be the early streaming leader.

Tagged In

Only a fool could think to be able to play games remotely on the cloud like they were on a local machine.

Until internet connections will be ultra fast 100Gbps bare minimum in no less than 70% of homes in all main countries these services are just a silly joke, a real shame and a bubble.

standard

ffs, you again!
I’ll retort with my own personal experience of ‘cloud gaming’.

I had either 20Mbit or 30Mbit connection at the time.

I gave OnLive a try back when you could play one of the Red Faction games for free. It didn’t look great, and there was an uncomfortable lag between input and response.

I later heard about gaikai, who offered, among others, Alan Wake for a free trial, before Sony bought them and closed the website that allowed this. It still didn’t look as good as local rendering (with respect to local hardware), but the response was significantly better than onlive. Obviously not as fast as locally rendered, that’s not going to be possible, but it was so slight that I could certainly live with it.

Now, I’m awful fussy with my games. I refuse to use a wireless mouse when playing FPS games because there’s a tiny delay.

However, most games don’t need lightning reactions (if any), and a fractional delay as the cost for playing any game, anywhere, on anything, is one hell of a good compromise!

I’m very excited for what Gaikai could offer. Emphasis on could. The entire PS1, PS2, PS3, back catalog playable instantly from anything with a screen and a controller? Sign me up!!!

tl;dr, local rendering will always have some advantages, cloud gaming has phenomenal potential.

Guest

I honestly hope they just release PS2 games as downloadable and not behind a streaming paywall. Their software team could probably make an emulator that would allow it to work on the PS4 — heck a lot of titles needed a bit of tweaking to work on the PS3 but the latest gen is 10x more powerful!

PS3 has a very unique and complicated architecture and I’m sure it isn’t something that can run off your hardware for a long time ahead. I get that. But if the PS2 is only available through Gaikai that is deliberately holding back what could be available to get more people paying extra for Gaikai. It makes business sense though I guess…

chojin999

PS4 and XBoxOne with the outdated slow AMD APU Jaguar are not 10x faster than the Cell on PS3 for sure.. the GPU is new but everything else it’s outdated AMD crap. The Jaguar it’s 50% slower than the cheapest Intel Core i3 dual-core CPU.

The simple fact that they already have to lower all details to the bare minimum to make the games run smoothly on the new consoles it’s absolute proof of the crap they are selling. They make games run at 1080p 60fps by using less complex, lower polygons count 3D models, flat textures, disabling light effects or setting at the minimum level and so on..
Even many 720p games on the new consoles are running at 20fps average .. they can’t even sustain a 30fps framerate.

chojin999

PS4 and XBoxOne with the outdated slow AMD APU Jaguar are not 10x faster than the Cell on PS3 for sure.. the GPU is new but everything else it’s outdated AMD crap. The Jaguar it’s 50% slower than the cheapest Intel Core i3 dual-core CPU.

The simple fact that they already have to lower all details to the bare minimum to make the games run smoothly on the new consoles it’s absolute proof of the crap they are selling. They make games run at 1080p 60fps by using less complex, lower polygons count 3D models, flat textures, disabling light effects or setting at the minimum level and so on..
Even many 720p games on the new consoles are running at 20fps average .. they can’t even sustain a 30fps framerate.

Joel Hruska

Ignore Chojin. He’s just trolling like usual.

Phobos

Aww, I though you ban him??

chojin999

You know I am telling the truth many people have been reporting already.. the question is.. are you going to censor me or are you going to write an article on that ?

“Boss fights and side-missions here tend to be much less of a strain for
the hardware, but once again, exiting a building to be met with an
undead parade still gives us that unwanted drop to 20fps.”

“It’s also unfortunate that the game runs at far from the promised
locked 30fps – rather a chugging 20fps during the zombie action while
out in the big city. Compared to the shaky E3 build seen just months ago
this is still a respectable step forward, and of course many of the
game’s technical shortcomings come with the unique circumstances of
meeting a hardware launch.””

Joel Hruska

I have never censored you. Neither has anyone at ET, to the best of my knowledge.

ET only removes posts in extraordinary circumstances.

Victor

Sorry, but William Usher bashes everything about xbox one.

Phobos

How do you know they are running at 20fps?

chojin999

And here it’s even really silly.. they claim the engine is outdated.. an outdated 3D engine would run a lot faster on an higher end machine..if that pc actually was any faster.. The fact that it doesn’t at all and they have to lower details to make it run at 60fps and it still it’s stuttering tells everything.

“The increase in pixel workload also means that the engine drops frames
more often in demanding scenes. At worst we’re looking at a drop down to
40fps when the engine is more heavily stressed, while most of the time
the dips in performance stick to fluctuating between 50 and 60fps.
Thankfully, the effects of these normal frame-rate drops are less
obviously visible than the judder caused by the renderer exceeding the
60Hz refresh…”

“

Phobos

Really? they only use two examples and we all know COD and BF games are buggy and need a patches as soon as they come out, why didn’t they try that out with killzone Shadow Fall? or Ryse: Son of Rome?

“Ryse: Son Of Rome – First Impressions
By Daniel George – Nov 19th, 2013 at 9:00 am

Ryse Visuals: 900p Ain’t Nothing To Scoff At

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the PS4 and the Xbox One’s abilities to hit 1080p and 60 FPS. Ryse does neither, but what it does at 900p and 30 FPS has been more visually impressive than anything else at that graphical setting on next-gen consoles. Crytek have been known to push out some of the best graphics on their games, infamously with the Crysis series, and now with Ryse: Son of Rome they are doing the best with what they have for Xbox One’s technical capabilities at launch.”

Killzone: Shadow Fall’s Framerate Isn’t Locked at 60, And Here’s Why Killzone’s lead designer explains why a constant 60 FPS isn’t as important as you might think.
by Chris Pereira September 26, 2013

Shadow Fall, the PlayStation 4-exclusive first-person shooter from Guerrilla Games, runs at 60 FPS in multiplayer “a lot of the time,” the developer stated at the Eurogamer Expo today. Lead designer Eric Boltjes told Eurogamer the reason behind that particular detail is “tricky.”

“Running 60 has become this Holy Grail. Suddenly people think if you run 60 your game is better. Technically, that’s not really true,” he explained. “But what it does do is it makes decisions go from input to on-screen a lot easier. So, having a constant 60 is not actually better than having a ‘lot of the time’ 60. It sounds weird, but it’s actually true. Because usually in the moments where we’re going to drop framerate, either you’re already dead or it’s too late anyway.”

You can turn the resolution up to the max, and it still doesn’t discount
the fact that there are obvious differences between both builds.

Now, I know we reported on the Xbox One games at E3 running on Nvidia powered GTX cards back in June, but it’s still possible that Forza
was running on an Xbox One dev kit with higher specs than the actual
Xbox One. It’s not so vastly different that a PC would be required to
run it; but it does show that there has been a lot of downscaling within
the environment and light passes to hit that magic 1080p resolution
with a fixed 60 frames per second refresh.

One of the most obvious differences – and this is something that shines
through on YouTube, no matter what the resolution – is that all of the
environmental self-shadowing has been removed. The pre-baked shadows
across the buildings and muted geometry for easy LOD caching and
buffering also indicates that the game was proportionally scaled to
operate within a very strict runtime environment. It’s almost as if you
can see where Turn 10 was counting every cycle tick per pixel removal
while optimizing the game to look and run its best on the Xbox One.

The one thing I really have to point out, though, is that we’re already entering into next-gen and the launch games are being scaled back from what they were originally supposed to look like during the earlier builds.”

Phobos

That I did not know, I guess only the ET guys can say something about that, I’m not sure why that is the only place they came out with that, any of the other websites I read never mention that.

PS4 plays the game at a native 1080p, whereas the Xbox One lowered it to 720p to guarantee a 60fps framerate

PlayStation 4 may have problems handling the graphics on Call of Duty: Ghosts.

Journalists and testers who have played the game on the new console
said that its frame rate dropped at several points during the game
causing it to stutter.

PS4 plays the game at a native 1080p, whereas the Xbox One lowered it to 720p to guarantee a 60fps framerate.

“One of the key pillars of Call of Duty has been 60 frames per
second… and ensuring that was of utmost importance, and the
resolutions that appear are geared around that,” said Activision head
Mark Rubin before the game’s release.

However, some reviews have said the PS4 version does not maintain a consistent frame rate.

“Frame rate hitches happen throughout the campaign on PlayStation 4
and, in a series known for its Hollywood-inspired bombast, it detracted
from the experience.”

Now Gamer added that it was concerned about the issue happening in the title’s online multiplayer mode.

“It’s rare – it only happened once every few matches – but it is definitely present,” it said
“

Phobos

They don’t say why but just bash the console and Ghost is already a buggy game on the pc as well.

Surging

you believe those rumours, I have not seen any stutter on my ps4 yet playing cod, but i tell you one thing Microsoft dropped to 720p because xbone is underpowered and prolly froze starting the game… them saying to guarentee 60fps is in other words saying so the game does not freeze, slow to a stall, skip, you wont see many 1080p 60fps games on xbone EVEER atleast for the next few years.

Landon Clements

Lol hey its the no life troll Chojinn!! Couple weeks ago this guy thought everyone in the world worked for sony who commented a good comment about ps4!. Lol dude go drink your own pee.

Surging

They can use the compute core on the GPU to process the emulation data. I do believe there is 4 cores with 8 units in each one.

Guest

I honestly hope they just release PS2 games as downloadable and not behind a streaming paywall. Their software team could probably make an emulator that would allow it to work on the PS4 — heck a lot of titles needed a bit of tweaking to work on the PS3 but the latest gen is 10x more powerful!

PS3 has a very unique and complicated architecture and I’m sure it isn’t something that can run off your hardware for a long time ahead. I get that. But if the PS2 is only available through Gaikai that is deliberately holding back what could be available to get more people paying extra for Gaikai. It makes business sense though I guess…

Marc Guillot

You are the fool here. 100Gbps ?. What do you wanna that for ?. That’s not the problem, we already have enough bandwith. The problem is the big latency on Internet.

A. J.

Agreed. If you have enough bandwidth to stream 1080p video, then you have enough bandwidth to stream a 1080p game stream. Latency is the big issue. Most online gaming uses advanced code to smoothen out latency and make the game appear to be fluid and not delayed.

However, running the entire game remotely would suffer from latency much more. In addition, if they are just emulating old games, then there wouldn’t be any compensation for the latency built in. Missing a jump because of a quick spike in latency will not go over well.

I definitely think this is the way of the future, but it may not be ready yet.

chojin999

Streaming a video it’s not like playing a game on a virtualized console on a rack of remote servers on the ‘net with or without VPN. Not at all.

You don’t interact much with a video. Playing a game on the cloud it’s completely different thing. And having a video steamed can be even worse than having full 3D rendering on the cloud.. the connections are anyway just too slow for both things.. it just can’t work. It’s going to be a mess.

A. J.

Actually, it is exactly like it as far as total bandwidth is concerned. The bandwidth requirements are:
The client downloads the video and audio streams.
The client uploads controller input.

The controller input requires very little bandwidth. Each one may be a byte or two of data. Audio and video make up the bulk of the bandwidth. And you can already estimate the bandwidth needs of those by looking at videos on Youtube and Netflix.

However, like my post said, the main concern isn’t total raw bandwidth. 20 mbps should be plenty. The concern is latency. If you have a 100ms ping time to the game servers, then every button press you do will be 100ms behind. And if anything chokes briefly and raises the delay to 200 or 300 ms for a short period of time, then you will really notice it.

Where typical streaming video is different, is that it has the luxury of buffering to compensate for any delays or abnormalities. Even half a second of buffer is huge, and something that games can’t have.

Marc Guillot

You are the fool here. 100Gbps ?. What do you wanna that for ?. That’s not the problem, we already have enough bandwith. The problem is the big latency on Internet.

http://www.facebook.com/timJ.collins Timothy Collins

Some games, though, would work well that way… I can see a version of “Civilization” or even :assassins Creed” working well in that respect by passing the bulk of the processing to the cloud. I don’t know if games like “Halo” would work quite as well though since there is a lot more work that has to be done for them…

It’s a little too early to say if this thing will really make waves at all, don’t you think? Look at what happened to OnLive. Yes they had tons of management problems etc. but when they first announced and showcased their technology, everyone was amazing and intrigued. A year or two later their booth was dead every time from that point on.

It’s an interesting technology to be sure, and pulling it off with great quality would be a great testament to how far technology has taken us. However having full server-side computing done 24/7 with dedicated servers -everywhere- to keep latency down will cost an enormous amount of money. That would need an unreal amount of subscribers to even be solvent! Especially considering how many people — even Americans still have internet connections barely fast enough to permit a stutter-free Youtube streaming experience, I doubt Gaikai will be that much better. Then people will proceed to call the service shitty and laggy and it’ll stumble out of the gate as a failed service, even if the fault lies in the poor speed most users will have. Sony will have to protect themselves from this…

I’d agree with you that Microsoft has a ton of experience/patents/infrastructure all set up to take the lead for this, but I also agree with Microsoft for developing the technology and sort of holding the cards first before they make any moves. Sony is being especially bold in my opinion but hey small bets gets you a small win and Sony needs to strike gold.

http://www.facebook.com/timJ.collins Timothy Collins

I don’t know if this is as big of a deal as many seem to think… I mean, I have a 360 that still works so I don’t really need a streaming cloud based services to play 360 games. I have to assume PS4 owners that have PS3 games have the same setup. And I rarely want to play old games on newer consoles. I guess for some it’s useful and all and more power to them, but I don’t think that majority of people are salivating to play PS3 games on the PS4…

tbake

why can’t we get original Xbox emulation on the Xbox One. how hard can that be wasn’t it a Celeron 733 and roughly a Geforce 3

Joel Hruska

Celeron 733 and a GeForce 2 MX, actually. You wouldn’t need to emulate the architecture, just the operating environment.

Brian52

Easy,Just keep the older systems. I do. And always buy hard copies. Servers go down its only a matter of time. I don’t like that most games drop online servers so quick (season passes should resolve this)but if no one is playing the game why keep the server up? My answer is ppl who missed out on a potential favorite but no one will agree. Oh well I’ll do what I do till they make it to where I can’t and the I’m out of gameing for good. I hate even saying that but it is what it is. Plz let me know what you think?

chojin999

Indeed. Software houses should use a P2P serverless approach if they can’t , better not want to, maintain the servers up for at least 10 years. It’s just a shame that people pay games that practically stop working just because they might see a drop in servers connections, which means nothing.. there is no way to tell how many would still want to play older games thru the years. A functionality people paid for when they bought the game, a functionality that stops working at the will of managers that want maximum profits with no costs.

Timmehhh

In not sure how this streaming would work, but if it is to be practical, they cannot rely simply on streaming a HD video stream. They need to be able to stream much fewer data packets, and use the console to put it all together. Eg, the start of a level could involve downloading textures and model/map information, then the console puts it all together.

These textures/models could be downloading while playing, and the console renders them as they become in drawing range.

Maybe when the game loads up it downloads some of the primary models and map information, and then when it has enough info you start playing while more downloads (just like PlayGo, only difference being that you are downloading to play, not to keep).

Of course all that is simple enough, the problem is the emulation required for older console games. Gaikai servers obviously do the emulation, but instead of streaming data, can they break that emulated data down, and send it in an efficient manner?

I really hope they can find an EFFICIENT way to do this.

As for the lag argument, consider it a slight increase in difficulty. Remember they are rolling out in individual continents, so it won’t be intercontinental lag. Just like playing on local dedicated servers, which is totally fine. I don’t see many people not playing CoD because of a small amount of lag, even when playing without dedicated servers.

Surging

Sonys GAIKAI > M$ Cloud

nuff said..

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